Friday, December 28, 2007

This is the current state of the back door. The forms have been removed from the concrete, and you can see the spacer for the drainage sticking through. And the Bituthene waterproofing is in place below the ground line.

You can also see how much above the "ground line" the ground actually is.. currently everything below the sill plate is underground, but there will be some excavation in back to bring it down to where it needs to be. The lot is MUCH higher in the back of the house than in the front, where we'd been taking our measurements, so there was some drama about the need for a real retaining wall.. That'll be a post for another day.

sump pump. It goes down below the clean crushed gravel, the first batch of which was delivered Thursday. There's much, much more to be backfilled in, but they're doing it one section at a time to minimize the chances of the dirt collapsing into the pits.

But that's now all filled in with gravel, as you can see here as Dan goes over the retaining wall ideas with foreman Jeff

On Friday, the plumber was here working on the new sewer lateral (a requirement when property changes hands in Alameda, we would've had to do this even if we hadn't done any renovations). The guys had cleaned up the wonky, leaky temporary line, so he had a much nicer time than he might've. He was nice enough to give us a 15 minute warning on cutting it open, so there were no icky surprises.

And here's the framing for our guest bedroom. They're framing the 2 structural walls here, and putting in the post and beam in the front as part of this job. We'll build the non-bearing walls and do all the finish work after we've run plumbing and all our wires.